Here is the
National Park Service's definition of the Underground Railroad:
"Traditionally the term refers to a multitude of routes
to freedom traken by fugitive slaves. ...The Underground Railroad
is the name given to the many ways that blacks took to escape
slavery in the southern United States before the Civil War."
("Underground Railroad," Washington DC: National Park
Service, 1998, pages 7 and 90.) Back to Part I.

8. On the strength of popular
sentiment, President James A. Polk asked Congress for a declaration
of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. This was the year of America's
"Manifest Destiny" - a slogan coined by a Democratic
newspaperman (whom Thoreau knew) to express a widespread expansionist
patriotism.
Opponents
of the war included virtually all free African Americans, who
"saw the annexation of slaveholding Texas in 1845 and the
outbreak of war with Mexico a year later as evidence of the expansion
of slaveholders' power." (Horton, In Hope of Liberty,
p. 247.) In Boston, blacks denounced a war "designed to strengthen
or perpetuate slavery," and Frederick Douglass declared that
Massachusetts had become "the tool of Texas."
As the acquisition of Mexico's huge stretches of land seemed to
prepare the way for expansion of slavery throughout the southwest
and west, sentiment among free blacks began to shift from Garrison's
nonviolence toward support for violent self-defense and
for using political as well as moral pressure to win the
struggle. Symbolizing this growing division, Frederick Douglass
split from Garrison in 1847, left Massachusetts, and established
a separate antislavery paper, The North Star.
In Concord, the war's critics included Ralph Waldo
Emerson ("Mexico will poison us") as well as Henry Thoreau.